The 2008 Ovatio Awards, by Ars Technica

Ars Technica surveys the year in tech, and separates the losers from the …

Buzzwords and Open-Source Projects

Open-Source Projects of The Year: WebKit and Firefox

2008 was a landmark year for browser competition, and it has brought some truly revolutionary advancements. It has been such a good year for the browser, in fact, that our award is a twofer: both WebKit and Firefox get Ovatios for their outstanding progress in 2008.

The WebKit HTML renderer, which was originally created by Apple as a fork of KDE's KHTML project, has gained an enormous amount of traction and is used in a remarkably diverse assortment of applications and platforms. Firefox has reached the mainstream and is finally cutting deep into Internet Explorer's marketshare.

WebKit is being adopted in so many places that it's practically ubiquitous. It's rapidly approaching a position of dominance in the mobile market, where Apple and Nokia have shipped it on millions of handsets. Google has also joined the party by using WebKit in Chrome and its Android mobile platform.

Webkit is also a major enabler of next-generation rich Internet application technology, such as the Adobe AIR runtime. It is already used in dozens of Mac applications, and is beginning to thrive on Linux. Changes made to WebKit's committer policy last year have made the project more inclusive and open, leading to broader public contribution.

Trolltech, which was acquired by Nokia this year, has tightly integrated the WebKit renderer into its Qt application development toolkit. There is also a GTK+ port that is still at an early stage of development and is being used experimentally in many programs.

Firefox has made impressive gains in marketshare this year, as it forcefully erodes Internet Explorer's dominance. Mozilla is also moving into new areas, having taken big steps this year toward offering a viable mobile browser.

The growing popularity of these open source rendering engines has led to a richer and more diverse web ecosystem with a strong emphasis on standards compliance and openness. The renewed competition is hugely beneficial to web developers and end users.

Buzzword of the Year: Cloud Computing

An IDC report from January of this year was one of a legion of such notes that hailed 2008 as the year of the cloud, and by now it's clear that the cloud boosters were right. At least, they were right if by "year of the cloud" they meant that 2008 would be the year that "cloud computing" caught on as a massively (some would say infuriatingly) popular buzzword. Everywhere you turned, it was "cloud" this and "cloud" that, and often it was difficult to discern precisely what a given pundit or booster meant by the term. Is "cloud" a new term for "utility computing"? Does it have to involve a web browser, or some other thin client model? Is it even possible to pin down "the cloud" as one specific thing with specific attributes and parameters?

We won't attempt to answer these questions, because at this point the cloud seems to be the kind of thing that you just stare at until it starts to look like something familiar—we see a rocket, you see a pony. But whatever you take the cloud to be, it's hard to deny that 2008 truly was its year. Storage, messaging, groupware, office apps, music, operating systems—if you can do it on a computer, then it's a good bet that someone this year has tried to do it "in the cloud."

Looking forward to 2009, the cloud is poised to morph into even more shapes, as IT departments looking to cut staff and overhead migrate different parts of their operations to it. Why pay a tech support worker to patch applications and update them when a cloud-based app requires no such work on your end? Why host costly server farms that are underutilized on average when you can buy storage and compute cycles on an as-needed basis from a service provider? So while it's ferociously hard to see into 2009, it is nonetheless quite clear that there are clouds ahead.